Dear President Obama and allies,
I write to offer some ideas for solving the environmental crisis while encouraging economic growth.
Executive summary
1. Scale up existing solutions.
2. Catch up to European laws first.
3. Create a national composting and recycling system.
4. Parlay the whole foods movement into an economic engine.
5. Get pioneering green innovation brought into the mainstream.
6. Encourage eating less meat.
7. Create a long-term human survival plan to encourage economic development.
1. “Scale up” existing solutions.
Solutions already exist. Now we need a massive ‘scaling up’ of existing technologies and practices. Every roof should have a solar hot water system. Every city should have a “Complete Streets” with bike lanes. And so on. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but rather, we need to mass produce the wheel that’s already working fine in small numbers. “Scaling Up” deserves to be an organizing theme in coming years.
2. Catch up to Europe first.
The EU is ahead on environmental issues and the US should start by copying them to catch up. While corporate America stalled, Europe raced ahead.
The US should adopt EU standards on toxic substances in products. For example, European kids are safer than American kids because their laws prevent phthalates in toys. In the last five years, the EU economy has flourished while adopting this strong eco-regulatory framework, according to Mark Shapiro, author of Exposed. We can start by making American products comply with European law so we have access to those markets. Easier still, we can require products to be labeled if they’d be banned in Belgium, as a new California law requires.
The city of Hague in the Netherlands has the best public transport in the world: street-level trams link to subways and trains, plus a bike system of bike lanes and bike racks. On the tram, they have little TV screens that announce each stop! As the green proverb says, “It’s not impossible if it already exists!” Let’s make our cities rebuild and flourish around a 21st century post-car transportation system. We can start by having one aspiring city install and model the Hague’s system as an engine for urban renewal.
3. Let’s create thorough national composting, recycling and E-waste program.
Our responsibility to future generations is to leave a planet that’s not a toxic swamp. Let us become conscious of our society’s digestion processes of our waste. We need national programs to deal with e-waste, recycling and compost. These programs are win-win for creating jobs, educating the public, creating a durable society, forging new technologies, and encouraging good design by manufacturers.
Cities should have composting facilities and curbside pick-up. This would create some industrial jobs creating the compost turning equipment. Lawn waste makes up 1/3 of trash, and so just composting it saves vast dollars and gives us the compost to use. The city of LA has done great work in this area with the help of Andy Lipkis, founder of Tree People.
Most importantly, composting teaches people about the recycling process inherent in matter. From old lettuce to compost pile and then the garden and back to lettuce. People think they can throw things “away”, but there is no “away” in a closed system like the test-tube of the Earth.
E-waste is an opportunity for economic development. We can build electronics so that we can easily reclaim the valuable metals for re-use. Currently, our E-waste is going to China to the planet’s most toxic work sites. People burn bonfires to melt the plastic off the wires, sending plumes of smoke into the sky and pollution into the rivers. This system will cause birth defects for generations around the world. The book High Tech Trash documents this problem in spooky detail.
Green jobs and a green economy ultimately mean creating products and jobs in harmony with Earth’s biological life-support systems. We need clean production processes and safe disposal for a product’s afterlife. We must “make a way out of no way” and create new methods for responding to our criminally disorganized trash system.
Humanity has yet to redesign around Rachel Carson’s central truth that the borders between things are permeable, and toxins in the environment enter the flesh, bioaccumulate and cause disease. One in 150 kids is autistic from toxins disrupting the brain’s delicate biochemistry. In 20 years, that ratio might be 1 in 5. We need to end “laissez-faire” environmental regulation too.
Global pollution is on track to bioaccumulate into “Global Toxicity.” Future generations may all be born with birth defects due to inescapable environmental toxins. Already mother’s milk around the world contains DDT traces.
Therefore, Green Jobs initiatives should focus on areas of municipal recycling and bioremediation. Our universities should invest all out in Biomimicry, Biodegradable Design, and Green Chemistry.
I recommend Professor William McDonough to head the Dept. of Design.
4. Build on the healthy food movement to create an economic boom that also solves root causes of the health care crisis.
During the Bush Dark Ages, many Americans took refuge from politics by retreating to make change in the private sphere of health choices. Many started ‘voting with their dollar’ for earth-friendly products and food. One of America’s most vital social movements surrounds healthy food.
The Obama Administration should amplify and invest in this whole foods movement. A vital web of people are ready to serve as a platform for a great national endeavor of healing the food supply.
Many food advocates support planting a “Climate Crisis Victory Garden” for the White House. Starting that garden would encourage all the right people.
Furthermore, our schools can serve healthy food. We can build school yard gardens. We can create a national network of farmer’ markets. We can insure poor people have access to fresh, clean food. We can make sure our hospitals serve healthy food. We can heal our food supply and that will help solve the health care crisis from the front end.
Next, we can get America’s industrial agriculture system to convert to ecological methods by ‘scaling up’ the best practices coming out of the organic farming movement. The Department of Ag spends 2% on organic Ag and 98 % on chemical Ag. We should flip those numbers. The Dept of Ag should create an Advisory Council headed by Michael Pollan, Alice Waters and Francis Moore Lappe. These are the names that need to be involved in healing American agriculture. These people have been throwing down the truth for decades.
We should assist US farmers in transitioning to organic methods. We should have organic farming development zones to create hubs of new green agribusiness.
5. Encourage into the mainstream green innovations and ecological ideas that have developed at society’s periphery.
America has a strong environmental movement that hasn’t gotten enough government support or cooperation. This entire movement has grown and thrived at the margins. Let’s create an onramp for ideas from the alienated progressive environmental movement. For example, Elliot Colemen is famous among organic growers for pioneering production of salad greens in unheated green houses in New England. This carbon-neutral technology should be massively scaled up.
For decades, many good people have been working steadily on environmental solutions. Remember, hairy post-hippies pioneered the Internet in California. One of America’s great strengths is a counterculture that has been steadily moving in the right direction for decades. Co-housing, organic farming, alternative medicine, vegetarian diets and less-consumptive lifestyles are all innovations from the progressive edge that now need to be scaled up for the mainstream.
Unfortunately, this movement has been largely opposed, discouraged, un-funded, harassed by government during this long Ice Age of Reagan. The Right wing has made cultural war on all things “60’s” for 40 years through various forms of prohibition. I think some Republicans oppose windmills because they don’t want that ethical vegetarian family member to win that long-running cultural argument.
So how does an aspiring to-be-green America access and upload all this waiting wisdom?
I recommend starting with organizing an idea-sharing project with the network surrounding the Bioneers Conference. This conference has been a real hub of dedicated, well-intentioned ecological thinking.
The Post Office can issues stamps of Rachel Carson, Helen and Scott Nearing, and J.I. Rodale to honor American pioneers of a sane relationship to the Earth.
We can install waterless toilets at the rest area’s along the highway system. Vermont Law School has toilets that should be replicated far and wide, with long drops and fans pushing the air downward. Let’s mainstream this ready-to-go technology.
America's indigenous First Peoples have ecological wisdom to offer and would be healed and uplifted in the process of being asked to share.
Humanity faces the challenge to integrate an surging population into the fragile life web of the Biosphere. Luckily, people have been working on it for years. Now let’s get the government to support, fund, and replicate the efforts of America’s grassroots environmental movement.
6. Encourage the reduction of eating meat.
Dealing with the Climate Crisis will require getting people to eat less meat. The crunched Climate Crisis numbers show that meat is a prime villain. While the gov’t can’t dictate private dietary choices, it can stop funding “perverse incentives” that encourage meat consumption. The gov’t should end subsidies for meat production on federal land, cut meat budgets to schools and prisons, make meat priced at true cost, and enforce safety standards in the meat industry. This would help decrease meat consumption and thus promote health and cut carbon emissions.
Make the prisons largely vegetarian. Studies show that vegetarian diets reduce prison violence, and meat production creates a lot of carbon. The motto could be “Can’t do rice & beans all the time, don’t do the crime.” A program could teach people in prison how to grow food and how to prepare healthy food. The link between diet and behavior problems in young people is well established. If America starts eating well, many other problems dissipate.
Additionally, we should raise stiff taxes on antibiotic use in factory farms to discourage the overuse that’s causes antibiotic resistance. Future generations need antibiotics to work.
7. Create long-term strategic plan for survival of the planet. Make this “design assignment” the inspiration and container for economic development.
We need to plot a trajectory towards a healthy human future. In some ways, the Economic Crisis comes at a good time. Better the economy collapsing now than the Biosphere collapsing in a decade or two. We have a real opportunity to start moving towards a 21st century civilization that won’t just eat all the resources and go off the rails in 20 years.
We can create comprehensive strategy for long-term human survival. We can make economic and strategy decisions within the constraints of good Earth stewardship. Our design assignment is the creation of a sustainable world civilization.
This is a tall order. We are very far from it now. But if we put our best minds on it, if we unleash human potential on the truest of true goals, we can surely do this.
Furthermore, economies flourish on continuity and long-term investment. When we get the parameters set for the next 300 years of human civilization, people will know where to invest. We can create a global renaissance of business, innovation, cooperation and prosperity. When humanity understands the design assignment, we will know how and what to build. When companies know what the environmental laws will be in 20 years, they will know where to invest their efforts. When industry knows there are taxes for creating toxic waste, they’ll reengineer the manufacturing process towards ‘green chemistry.’ Government can provide the vision and direction and the carrot and the stick for the new society’s design parameters.
Now is the time to create a vision and plan for the long-term survival of human civilization.
May humanity get it together and live happily ever after.
Theo Talcott grows certified organic food professionally, writes on environmental issues and studies green issues at the Bioneers Conference. He blogs at thinkingaboutsurvival.blogspot.com
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